Ever wondered why you almost never hear women doing the voiceovers for movie trailers? Not sure why I did, but I found some interesting research behind how audiences react differently to men’s and women’s voices. From last Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section:

“What gender is the voice of God? The question has been pondered by mystics through the ages, but in the sanctuary of cinema the voice of a sonorous, authoritative, fear-inspiring yet sometimes relatable presence is, invariably, that of a man. Consider the trailer and the omniscient, disembodied voice that introduces moviegoers to a fictional world….”

I’ve got a piece in today’s Sports section on Egyptian dominance in the sport of squash.

“In Egypt we don’t obey rules as the English, or Germans, or in the States,” said Ramy Ashour, the former world champion. “This helps us in squash.”

I was in Borneo last month to see the magnificent and adorable orangutans, and shot this photo essay about our close relatives.

Here’s the accompanying piece: ”All life is precious, but the demise of the orangutan hits especially close to home….”

Nevada’s high northeastern desert, there are 200,000 skiable acres and several summits that top 11,000 feet, and a small heliski operation that has wielded a monopoly on dumps in this remote range for 34 years

Here’s my piece in the December issue of Skiing Magazine.

2011 was the year that a new, iron-oxide-eating bacterium was found devouring the Titanic. Scientists learned of a mushroom in Brazil that enters and then alters the brains of carpenter ants, causes them to die in the act of eating shrub leaves, and then grows out their heads—the scientists nicknamed it the “zombie-ant fungus.” Four new bees were identified in New York City, and 12 new frog species were located in India, including one that croaks like a meowing cat. In Southeast Asia’s Mekong region, researchers counted 200 new species this year, among them a female-only lizard that clones itself. A Mexican fisherman inadvertently pulled up a rare, one-eyed cyclops shark. And researchers combing a South African mine found, living in the fluid-filled rock fractures, the deepest-known multicellular organism: a nematode worm, grazing on bacteria.

My round-up of some of the bizarre and unexpected creatures that were entered into the annals of life as we know it this year.

This winter the National Science Foundation and one of its contractors, Raytheon Polar Services, is shuttling fuel 1,040 miles from its coastal Antarctic base, McMurdo Station—the primary American logistical hub—to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. A century ago, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the pole. He used sled dogs and skis; the NSF and Raytheon will soon use automated Caterpillar and Case tractors. The robotic vehicles will crawl across the continent at 5 to 12 mph for 24 hours a day, accomplishing in just a week and a half what took Amundsen nearly two months. Here’s how they’re doing it.

Nice to pick up a couple Lowell Thomas awards again this year, for both the writing and photography of my Amazon story that ran in the NY Times last fall. See it here.

In August I spent 10 days in Tonga swimming with humpback whales, on assignment for ISLANDS Magazine. It blew me away. Check out this short video about the experience.

My feature, on snorkeling with humpback and marine conservation, will appear in an upcoming issue of the magazine.

I passed through Queenstown, New Zealand last January en route to Antarctica. For the Wall Street Journal, I came up with the idea for a piece in which I would cram a bunch of adrenaline activities into a single day. So here you have it–jetboating, whitewater rafting, and bungy jumping. Includes a video of me screaming for my life in free fall over a river canyon.

This spring I spent three weeks in the Philippines with a team of scientists from the California Academy of Sciences, trawling the ocean floor, canvassing the jungly flanks of volcanoes and diving in coral reefs. The scientists believe they have discovered more than 300 species that are new to science–including colorful new sea slugs, dozens of spiders and a shrimp-eating swell shark that lives 2,000 feet under the sea.

The research expedition constituted the largest, most comprehensive scientific survey ever conducted in the Philippines, one of the most species-rich places on earth.

You can find my story and photos at Smithsonian.

I have some other photos at National Geographic News.

Went to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to write and shoot a 10-page feature for Caribbean Travel + Life Magazine on the cultural developments underway in the city’s old colonial district. Cool place. Story out now in the June/July issue. Here are more of my photos from the assignment.

In this week’s New York Times Science section, I wrote and photographed a story about the fate of Adelie penguins in Antarctica. The gist: climate change has created a paradise for some pack ice penguin colonies and a purgatory for others, but the long-term fate of all Adélie and emperor penguins seems sealed, as relentless warming eventually pulls their rug of sea ice out from under them. However, Adélie penguins face possible extinction not merely because of a loss of habitat  —  but by an unshakable fear of darkness.

I reported the piece in January from the world’s southernmost penguin colony, Cape Royds, during a visit to the South Pole and McMurdo Station, the largest U.S. base in Antarctica. The week I was there, McMurdo residents happened to organize a marathon race on the ice shelf, which I also covered for The New York Times Sports section.

To see more photos from Antarctica, check out this gallery.

I have a piece in the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic about an experiment with launching fake Twitter identities to engineer social networks — and its implications. Turns out the U.S. military has an interest in this. Read on….

In the March issue of Islands, I wrote about a four-day sailing trip across the Hawaiian Islands, on a full-scale replica of a traditional Hawaiian double-hulled voyaging canoe, with one of the few remaining navigators trained in ancient Polynesian wayfinding. Our voyage on the renowned Hokulea was assisted by celestial navigation, and without any technological aids. “Voyaging,” one crewman told me, is “a world of magic, where the heavens come down to the earth and you actually get lifted and sail in the stars. So it’s like a dance,” he said. “As the canoe goes up a wave, it does a little hula. Elvis was never the king of rock and roll, ‘cause we know, we’ve been rockin’-and-rollin’ since time immemorial.”.

I have posted more of my photographs from the trip here.

The World, a weekday radio news magazine (a co-production of WGBH/Boston, PRI, and the BBC World Service) today broadcast a segment I recorded last spring from the Ecuadorian rainforest, visiting the Achuar people for a New York Times piece.

Listen to it here.

Just back from Algiers, where I attended a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of UN General Assembly Resolution 1514: The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Former presidents - South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda - and figures in African freedom movements, as well as journalists and filmmakers from Africa and other former colonies, swirled around the Palace of Nations on the city’s outskirts.

On the route back, I stopped a week in Paris. Check out the photo gallery.

I shot and wrote the cover story in this week’s NY Times Travel section on the Ecuadorian Amazon, where a remote tribe fights against oil development: a tale of indigenous culture, shamanism, ayahuasca visions, dreams, grief, forest spirits, butterflies and Ben Stiller.

Check out additional photos in this gallery on my website.

Sarah Lippett, a talented illustrator in London, created this mash-up of some of the scenes and characters I’ve encountered on my travels (obviously I’m the tourist-looking character):

A nice thing, winning two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards today:

My 2009 story for The New York Times, on Tajikistan — “Pamir Mountains, the Crossroads of History” — was awarded the Silver in the “Newspaper Article on Foreign Travel” category, while my photography for that story won the Gold in the “Newspaper Photo Illustration of Travel Article” category.

I just returned from a sailing trip in Hawaii aboard the Hōkūleʻa,  a Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe. Our voyage — from the Big Island to Maui, Molokai and Oahu - was a tribute to the Satawalese Master Navigator Mau Piailug, who taught his knowledge of non-instrument navigation to a small group of Hawaiians in the 1970s, and passed away this summer. Navigating our vessel was one of the Hawaiians who “Papa Mau” first mentored. The Hōkūle‘a was launched in 1975, and has completed nine voyages to destinations in Micronesia, Polynesia, Japan, Canada, and the United States, all using ancient wayfinding techniques of celestial navigation. After our voyage, she went into dry dock for a year, to prepare for an around-the-world sail that begins in 2012.

My story will appear in the September 2011 issue of Islands Magazine.

Check out the photos here.

Recently, some folks I know conducted a two-day media experiment. On a Friday afternoon, they asked for submissions on a theme (which they called it “hustle”) and gave people 24 hours to turn something in. 1,500 essays, photos, and illustrations streamed in from media professionals and non-professionals, and they whittled those down to 70 pieces. By Sunday they had put together a 60-page print magazine.

They called it 48 Hour Magazine, a name which CBS threatened to sue them over. (Now it’s called Longshot Magazine.) It won a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism.

I submitted a handful of previously unpublished photos from a trip in 2007 to a lawless gold mining settlement in the jungle of Suriname. Somehow important captions got lost, but you can check out the photo essay here.

This month, I wrote an essay in Recce, an online literary travel journal edited by Don George. It’s about borders—about crossing them to explore another world, or not, and simply imagining what lies on the other side of them, told through a story about my experiences in Central Asia over a seven-year period dancing around, and then finally entering, Tajikistan.

You can read it here.

I just returned from a quick four days in the Azores, a Portuguese paradise that has seemed to escape tourism marketing. Nine islands, stranded in the mid-Atlantic, each with distinct character. UNESCO world heritage towns and vineyards, fresh seafood and cheeses, wild flowers everywhere, hot springs, bull fights, crater lakes, Portugal’s highest mountain, and restored old walking paths crisscrossing the terrain.

Some snapshots here.

In this week’s Travel section, a wee review of a very good restaurant in Berkley, Calif. started by very good people committed to the changing the way we grow, source and eat food.

In the March/April 2010 issue of AFAR: a feature about a dessert sushi I created in northern Laos in 2002, its ensuing popularity in the rural village of Muang Ngoi and immortalization in Lonely Planet, and my return last year to reclaim my legacy. For the opening spread, AFAR hired LA editorial photographer Jeff Minton to shoot me in San Francisco with the “falang roll.” Fun gig!

In the November/December 2009 Mother Jones I wrote about Paul Stamets, a charismatic mycologist, and our sailing voyage through the coastal islands off British Columbia looking for a rare mushroom he has found to be highly active against flu viruses, TB and smallpox. Stamets functions as an ambassador for an entire taxonomic kingdom, and has been elevated by some to a kind of cult figure. He’s listened to in a variety of unexpected corners—from the Defense Department and academic research institutions to environmental groups and Hollywood. His intuition of fungi has yielded a range of inventions, including a cellulosic ethanol fuel and a pesticide that kills termites.

http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/paul-stamets-mushroom

As I experienced working on this, you may not think of mushrooms the same way again…hope you enjoy!

I wrote and photographed the cover story, on Tajikistan, in the December 20 Travel section of the New York Times. I spent three weeks last August crossing the Pamir Mountains, along the Afghan border, a region known for centuries as the Roof of the World that figured along ancient Silk Road trade routes. Stupendous and fascinating.

Story and slide show

The World, a weekday radio news magazine (a co-production of WGBH/Boston, PRI, and the BBC World Service) today aired a segment I recorded from Tristan da Cunha:
http://www.theworld.org/2009/10/28/most-remote-inhabited-island-on-earth/

In the October 2009 issue of National Geographic Adventure Magazine I wrote a feature about ocean engineer Graham Hawkes and the sub that he secretly built with famed aviator and millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett. Fossett died in a plane accident and Hawkes has continued developing his lightweight subs that fly like underwater aircraft. Also includes some of my photography.

Currently (through mid-October) I am in the South Atlantic on the world’s most remote inhabited island, Tristan da Cunha, for National Geographic Traveler Magazine. So remote and isolated that I had to ask a passing ship two months ago to take this message to the Internet.